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I don’t see it as everyone does. To me the headline is that for the first time since the election of the most polarizing president in modern memory, the American people yielded a national verdict on his first two years of his governance. And it was not a sweeping rebuke.

A record 114 million Americans went to the polls and did what they tend to do in normal presidencies. Since World War II, the average loss for the president’s party in a midterm is 30 House seats. Mr. Trump’s party appears to have lost 35. (Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63 in 2010.) This wasn’t the registering of a national rejection, more like business as usual.

For an outlandish president, business as usual is a bit of a boost.

Democrats threw everything they had into the battle—money, organization, passion. They got more votes than Republicans, but the election was also a test of what a friend calls the Democrats’ Death Star—the unprecedented mobilizing of the entire culture industry on their behalf. The “go vote” messaging was a tremendous effort, from the commanding heights of the culture, to make voting cool to Democratic-leaning groups, to make it a sign of existential goodness. And it did goose millennial turnout, but not enough to save Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum in Florida, Richard Cordray in Ohio, Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

Barack Obama took to the stump to no apparent effect. Oprah dazzled but couldn’t pull Ms. Abrams over the line. Taylor Swift informed her 112 million Instagram followers that Marsha Blackburn was the enemy. Everyone cheered. Mrs. Blackburn won by 11.

Showbiz ain’t what it used to be. America isn’t as simple as it seems.

What now? What will the Democrats do with the House?

We saw the mood of the moment in the Jacksonian melee of Wednesday’s news conference. The president was conciliatory until the mood passed. He’d “like to see bipartisanship,” but if Democrats come at him with new investigations, he will take a “warlike posture.”

The Democrats will launch new probes, in part because they can’t help themselves. It’s in their DNA, and they’re all jacked up on Watergate retrospectives in which the heroic congressman finds the searing truth and lectures the dart-eyed White House staffer.

A priority is said to be reinvestigating Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It still hurts so much. But several Democratic senators who voted against him lost. Democrats, for your own good and the good of the nation, suck it up. America has fought that battle. It ended how it ended. Grown-ups know when it’s over.

Two years of fruitless fighting seems inevitable, doesn’t it? But it will be hard on America, another demoralizing mess. There is a better way. It begins with the idea that deals are good, not bad. America would benefit from legislative agreements on health care, immigration, infrastructure.

First Democrats need to change their style. They have spent the past two years, since the beginning of the post-Clintonian era, hissing at hearings and wearing pink hats. They looked like fools. Sen. Claire McCaskill acknowledged it in the closing argument of her losing campaign: “I’m not one of those crazy Democrats.” They should try to present themselves now as a serious governing party, as people of stature.

They should wait for Robert Mueller’s findings, which will come soon enough. Until then any new probes should be few and orderly. A smarter way to operate would be for Democrats to move on legislation while holding the threat of investigations over the president’s head. The new speaker could confide to him in the Oval Office that he or she has personally stopped 16 probes this week, at some personal political cost.

Tuesday night gave party leaders new room to maneuver. For two years established Democrats have been freaked out by the rising progressives of their base. Those progressives are an angry lot, and demanding. But they just had a bad election. Their darlings fell. At the moment—just the moment—they should be tended to, but not feared.

Democrats should understand the president wants a deal. He’s in another circus phase; he needs to show he can roll with history’s punches. And there’s a sense he actually yearns for greatness. When he talks about deal-making he sounds almost wistful. He wants to do something big.

Do it with him. Newt Gingrich wasn’t the friend of the calculating, louche Bill Clinton, and Mr. Clinton didn’t like those mean-minded, selfish right-wingers. Yet together they made pretty good music—balanced budgets, welfare reform. It served their interests, but they also had a sense of historical responsibility. Democratic leaders in the House have to be equal to Newt in impulse control. It’s not a high bar!

They have the president at a disadvantage. He is a businessman who’s never had to answer to a board. His whole professional life it was him and his whims and his hunger and a series of organizations of which he was sole or principal owner. Democratic leaders should see themselves as his board. They’ve got a CEO they don’t like, but they’ve got some power and they’re using it to save the company. A united board can scare a CEO. Donald Trump up against a board will not be so sure-footed. He will agree to a lot of what you want.

Progress on illegal immigration and controlling the border would please the working class, show Democrats as capable, hearten the nation. And when the caravan walking north (and future caravans) know both major parties are against what they’re doing, they’ll stop it or slow down. They’re a caravan only because they know the American parties are divided, and they see an opening in that division.

Progress on immigration would require concessions from the Democrats, and might take a major issue away from the Republicans. But progress on health care would take concessions from Republicans and take a major issue away from Democrats. A deal there would almost certainly give Democrats a lot of what they want. But the president has signaled flexibility.

And it’s not as if such deal making would wound his political soul. He’s a moderate New York Democrat anyway. The play he should have made early on, as a unique political figure with a populist base, was always Chuck and Nancy, not Paul Ryan. Why not do it now?

Throughout the election it was clear Democrats couldn’t tell you who they are, and Republicans didn’t tell you what they’d do. They didn’t know; the president hadn’t told them. But sometimes when things are unclear, new possibilities emerge.

What politicians forget in the day to day, chest-deep in the fray, is the reason they are there. It’s not to serve themselves and their party. If you’re a member of Congress, it’s to represent a portion of America, a little sliver of the country, to see to its realities and interests while keeping an eye, first, on the nation as a whole.

This country could use some deals.

This is actually a time of promise and possibility because it’s a time of movement. Nancy Pelosi loves her country. So, I think, does Donald Trump. They should do something big for it, and not just devote themselves to two years of a fruitless fight.

We’re going to the polls and looking for leaders. What do we want? What a voter told Bret Baier a week ago, live from the campaign trail: someone she can cheer for. She was such an American, half hopeful, half wistful.

When people have real leaders, there’s a feeling of security: Somebody reliable is in charge. When a majority don’t feel that, there’s a sense of unrest, of jitteriness that filters out and down. America’s never at full peace, it’s not our style, but there’s a greater sense of soundness, and less frantic scrolling down for the latest horror, when you feel there are solid folk in office.

There are suddenly a lot of new books on leadership. I asked Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the easygoing yet scholarly “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” why. “Because we feel the absence of leadership now, not only in the president but in the Congress—the inability to get together and get things done.” When you lack something, you try to define exactly what it is so you can find it. We feel “a yearning for togetherness” and wonder which political figures might help set the nation in a common direction.

Ms. Goodwin asks questions in her book—“Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership?”—and suggests answers through profiles of leaders under duress. She focuses on personal qualities. Leaders assume responsibility for pivotal decisions, transcend personal vendettas, try all paths to compromise. She tells me a good leader has “an ambition for self that becomes an ambition for something larger.” Leaders remind us we’re citizens, “part of the American story,” not merely anxious spectators. “In every moment of our turbulent times it wasn’t just the leader who was present, it was the American people.”

In his magisterial new “Presidents of War,” Michael Beschloss notes that since the founding, presidents “have taken the American people into major wars roughly once in a generation.” They have too often “seized for themselves the power to launch large conflicts, almost on their own authority.” The founders would be “astonished and chagrined” that the “life or death of much of the human race has now come to depend on the character of the single person who happens to be the President.”

Mr. Beschloss tells me his thoughts go to the qualities of leadership that Americans should demand when choosing candidates for that office: probity, judgment and “towering empathy” for those Americans who fight and endure our wars. “Lincoln demanded that a new military cemetery be located where he could often see it, so that he would be painfully confronted with the terrible results of the decisions he was making.”

I add these thoughts on political leadership (and “he” includes “she”):

A leader is someone who first of all means it, and you can tell. He sincerely holds the views he espouses: He is serious. Advancing them is his project and purpose.

The ideas he stands for are not merely policy points on an issues matrix. They are held together by a central overarching intention. The new nation called America will survive and thrive while holding to its liberties. The Union must hold. The Cold War will be won, and we will win it. The intention springs from a general but discernible political philosophy.

Politicians who can’t turn the dots into a picture are not artists but failed pointillists. They don’t present a full picture. In the end it’s all just dots. No one ever voted for long for a dot.

Great leaders are capable of arguing for the things they believe in. They can make the case. They can make you think along with them, logically, from point A to point B and beyond. Their words aren’t emotional, as politicians’ tend to be now in an attempt to make a sated audience feel something. (And also because they’re confused about what eloquence is; they think it means fancy.) When leaders rely on logic and fact, voters do feel something: gratitude at the implied respect, and a feeling of warmth at membership in a community of thought and belief.

Eloquence in political leaders is desirable but not necessary. Too much is made of it even as the real thing disappears. It’s good if you can make the case in a way that is memorable, and that voters can hold in their heads. FDR and Reagan were great and eloquent. But Dwight Eisenhower led American forces through World War II, managed the early days of the Cold War, and built the interstate highway system. Yet listening to him talk was like making your way through children pillow fighting—lots of noise but nothing that made an impression. His actions were eloquent.

Good leaders live in the real world. They don’t insist on grand ideologies they can squish down on your heads. They know the facts and work within them. They respect reality.

A leader is aware he is the object of many eyes. This puts a responsibility on him to act in a certain way—with respect for his own dignity and yours. Even if he’s not in the mood, he must uphold standards of presentation. Children are watching and taking cues. That means the future is watching.

A leader isn’t just trying to survive for himself, to hold on to power. Yet a leader tries always to survive. Good leaders are survivors: That’s part of how they show loyalty to what they stand for, by being there to stand for it. How to survive? Shift strategies and tactics but not principles. And admit when you’re wrong, in part because it’s refreshing. Politicians so rarely do it.

A serious leader bothers to have command of the facts. Leadership isn’t all airy impulses, it’s knowing local and national facts because you’ve studied and absorbed them. You did the work.

A good leader knows the difference between stubbornness and perseverance. When you’re afraid to look like you backed down, to yourself or others, it’s stubbornness. When you’re willing to pay a price for where you stand, every day, it’s perseverance.

A shrewd leader knows what time it is. He watches each side and sees what tendency is coming up, and going down. In that movement he spies openings. A politician fully alive to signs and signals would have seen the meaning, in 2010, of the town hall uprising’s major cry: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” The media found it hilarious: these stupid Republicans hate ObamaCare but love their entitlements. Democrats saw it as hypocrisy, Republican professionals as schizophrenia. Few saw it for what it was: a new Republican populism was rising, one fully aligned to big state entitlements people felt they’d earned.

When you, the voter, aren’t presented with candidates who look like real leaders, what do you do? Pick the closest to the ideal. Fall back on the practical. Make do with what you have, which is what we usually do.

Mr. Beschloss, in an email: “Choose a candidate whose values and heart and life experience you feel comfortable with, so that you can feel confident about the vast majority of political decisions they will make, if elected, that you will never hear about.”

The attempted bombing of political figures is domestic terrorism meant to disrupt and intimidate. That it came to light less than two weeks before an election whose outcomes may constitute a national rebuke to—or soft boost of—President Trump’s controversial leadership means that passions are high and will stay so. Things are feeling primal, tribal.

There’s more than enough time before the voting for the gates of hell to open. Let’s try to keep them shut.

What can help? Some things I’d like to see:

It is crucial that law enforcement use every resource to find the bomber or bombers. They should do this not only actually but showily, to help return an air of order. All law enforcement should be extremely, unusually forthcoming about the facts and state of the investigation. We’re all tired of their swanning around after school shootings with their secret information we can’t have. Be as open as possible without injuring the investigation. This may help calm the finger pointing. “It was a left-wing false-flag operation!”

Everyone running for office should admit things have gotten too hot, too divided. Then they should try to cool the atmosphere. Next Tuesday will mark one week before the election. Candidates should devote the day to something different. It would be good to see every one give a speech or statement containing their most generous definition of the aims and meaning of the opposing party. A Democratic nominee might say, “Whether they always succeed or not, Republicans do want to protect the liberties that have allowed this nation become the miracle of the world.” A Republican might say, “At its best and most sincere, the Democratic Party hopes to help those in peril, and to soften disparities of wealth and opportunity.”

The dirty secret of most political professionals is that they do see virtues in the other party. And when you show respect for people, they tend to put down their rocks.

Does this sound dreamy or otherworldly? Yes. But a tender moment isn’t the worst thing that could happen to us right now, and enraged people will find it boring. We want them bored. And actually I don’t mean it as sentimental but reorienting—a reminder for some and an education for others about what it is we’re trying to do here.

Claire McCaskill, Sherrod Brown, let us hear you on what you know to be admirable in the Republican Party—and in Republicans. Ted Cruz, Martha McSally, the same from you on the Democrats. Show some largeness. We’re dying of smallness.

Both parties could absorb an essential truth of the moment.

Democrats really and sincerely see the threat of violent words and actions as coming from the right. It’s Mr. Trump—he’s hateful and has no respect and it sets a tone. He encourages fights at his rallies; he said the other night that a congressman who pushed around a reporter was his kind of guy. He calls the press the enemy of the people. He widens all divisions, mindlessly yet opportunistically. No surprise his adversaries are being sent bombs.

Republicans and the right truly, deeply see the threat as coming from the left. Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory Booker actually told crowds to get in Republicans’ faces; Hillary Clinton says you can’t treat them civilly. Republicans see the screamers and harassers at the Kavanaugh hearings, the groups swarming Republican figures when they dine in public, antifa. A man who wrote “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” on Facebook didn’t insult Rep. Steve Scalise last year; he shot and almost killed him. The intimidation is coming from the left.

Trump supporters don’t take him seriously when he issues his insults. He’s kidding; he doesn’t mean it; he’s Trump. You’re lying when you say he makes you afraid.

But the left finds him, and some of his allies, honestly—honestly—dangerous.

Just as the right finds Ms. Waters and Mr. Booker and Mrs. Clinton and the swarms and the hissers and antifa honestly—honestly—the threat.

Neither side appreciates—neither side credits—the anxiety the other side legitimately feels. They have no sensitivity to it. They had better get some.

When conservatives see a liberal or progressive not condemning Mr. Booker or Ms. Waters, they assume it’s because the liberal agrees with what they say—that intimidation is part of the plan.

There is too much blindness to how the other side is experiencing the situation. It’s in the news media, too. Politicians should have a greater awareness of their own role in the drama.

Thursday morning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was on television, saying words that were meant to be helpful. We’re not Democrats and Republicans really, he said, we’re Americans; we can’t be divided. It was good, he clearly meant it. But he spoke as if he had no memory of strikingly divisive words he’d uttered just a few years ago. In January 2014 he said of those who are pro-life, pro-traditional-marriage and pro-gun that they are “extreme conservatives” who have “no place in the state of New York.” No place in the state of New York? That is an extreme and aggressive statement, and it speaks of how too many progressives and liberals feel about conservatives. This kind of thing isn’t new, and it’s contributed to the moment we’re in.

Politicians, don’t lecture us. Clean up your own side of the street.

As to the president, one thought. He will never lead effectively at moments like this because he can’t. It’s not within his emotional range or in his intellectual toolbox. The targets of the would-be bombs have been his antagonists. He’s not believable when he issues pained vows of unity. Everyone assumes his staff told him to do it and in a burst of amiability he did. When he’s obnoxious, people believe he’s speaking his mind.

Mr. Trump has ushered in a new presidential era of verbal roughness. At his rallies he sees himself as being provocative and humorous and teasing. His crowds know he is entertaining them and they have fun back, re-enacting their old 2016 fervor with “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” They don’t emerge whipped into a rage; they leave in a good mood, though tired from standing so long because he speaks so long.

The president knows half the country is watching, and dislikes and disdains what it sees. What he doesn’t seem to know is that the unstable are watching, too. They get revved up, ginned up, pro and con. There is danger in this.

Mr. Trump seems to think only about his audience and his foes. He doesn’t seem to proceed with a broad knowledge that there are the unstable among us, and part of your job as president is not to push them over the edge. It can get ugly when you do.

In a funny way he seems to think everything’s more stable than it is, that the veil between safety and surprise is thicker than it is. Maybe you assume everything’s safe when you’ve spent your whole adult life, as he has, with private security and private cars, surrounded by staff. Maybe that makes you careless, or too confident.

But few of our political leaders seem especially sensitive to the precariousness of things. I wish they worried about the country more. That really is dreamy and otherworldly, isn’t it?

This may seem small, but I don’t think it is. I know it will seem old-fashioned. It has to do with a great nation’s sense of its own stature on the world stage.

In the days after the apparent murder of the Saudi activist and writer Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump was repeatedly pressed about the potential U.S. response if it turned out, as seemed likely, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing. Mr. Trump made it clear his first consideration was what he thought of as a practical one: He didn’t want to cancel lucrative arms deals with the Saudi government. “I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,” he said. That number was inflated, but Saudi Arabia is the largest purchaser of U.S. weapons.

Mr. Trump told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes”: “I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that.” Later in the week he told reporters that Saudi Arabia is a “tremendous purchaser” of U.S. military equipment, and this must be factored in.

It was startling. We talk like this now? In public? I guess it’s supposed to look tough and bottom-line. But we declare now that U.S. foreign policy is quite so transactional?

President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

We used to be ashamed, or at least embarrassed, to be seen as arms merchant to the world. It didn’t quite sit with our vision of ourselves. And American presidents, as representatives of a nation with a certain moral stature, didn’t use to declare that our world stands are heavily influenced by arms contracts.

We used to play it a little more high-minded. Because we didn’t want the world to see us as crude and mercenary. And even if our discretion was hypocritical, it was at least the tribute vice pays to virtue.

All this made me think of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” in which Andrew Undershaft, the contentedly amoral manufacturer of cannons, guns, torpedoes and aerial gunships, shares the “true faith” of the munitions maker: “To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles.”

But he was not precisely the good guy of the drama. America has always thought it is, and its reality should never veer far from its sense of itself. Trouble always happens when it does.

There are reasons to make arms, and not only economic but technological and strategic reasons to want America, not China or Russia, making them. But the fact that the defense industry is so big, and that people-blower-uppers is one of our major exports, ought to bring a certain and regular human discomfort and self-reflection. Arms industry profits shouldn’t be—and should never be announced as—a primary consideration in our foreign-policy decisions. How does that make us look better to any other people? Or even to ourselves?

The context for all this is the election, which is possibly why the president reverted so quickly and crudely to jobs.

The common wisdom a year ago leaned on history: The president’s party loses in an off-year, the only question is how much. It then became “Trump is so divisive and his approval numbers so underwater, a blue wave is coming.” Recently it was “Not so fast—the Democrats are confused as to their meaning and method. They could blow this thing.”

Then Brett Kavanaugh. After the onslaught he faced, Republicans were energized, especially in red-leaning states, where a rough wisdom took hold: Even a guy you don’t especially like can get railroaded. And this guy was being railroaded. It gave a boost to Republicans in U.S. Senate races that may or may not diminish.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics sees the Democrats close to winning the House but not there yet. They need to gain 23 seats. At the moment Mr. Sabato says they look to be in the mid to high teens.

There are 2½ weeks to go, which is plenty of time for the gates of hell to burst open. Both parties are focused and on fire. Each is being reminded of at least one big issue.

For Democrats it is a part of ObamaCare that people like, mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions. A Wall Street Journal analysis noted about 130 million nonelderly people in the U.S. suffer from an existing medical condition, and included a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation that found 75% of voters consider it “very important” that the provision guaranteeing their coverage remain. For Republicans a longtime issue may well reassert itself, illegal immigration, and what Reuters calls “a caravan of several thousand” currently coming north from Central America.

Democrats also have the unpopularity of the president working in their favor, and Republicans have warnings of the return of a liberal House led by Nancy Pelosi. Republicans have, too, the rising spleen of the left, which is scarifying to the peaceful and will likely bring a backlash.

Both parties are spending record amounts, with Democrats running for the House and Senate raising over $1 billion through September, and the Republicans around $700 million, according to the Washington Post.

But in the end it’s about Mr. Trump, isn’t it? He is the living context and the constant question: For or against? He has had significant achievements—unemployment down, economy up, the courts, an imperfect tax bill that nonetheless got passed and was slightly better than what it replaced. No one seems to mention it, but America right now is enjoying prosperity and peace—or, if you prefer, growth and no new wars. It is a continuing amazement that with this the president can’t get himself to 50% approval, or his party in a better position.

Yet of course it’s no mystery. He obscures his victories with his crazy. And so in the weeks before the election he rants around about “Horseface,” and compares MBS to Justice Kavanaugh, the victim of unproved allegations. He continues to rag on Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “I could fire him whenever I want to fire him, but I haven’t said that I was going to.”

It is political malpractice on an epic scale and cannot be helped because he lacks self-command and is vain. He thinks nobody communicates like him. Nobody does. He thinks nobody breaks through like him. Nobody does!

In the first 18 months of his administration, those who pointed out that he’d made a good decision, or failed to castigate him enough, were sometimes accused of “normalizing” Mr. Trump. But normalizing him wasn’t within their power. Only Mr. Trump could normalize Mr. Trump, by enacting normality and self-possession. He could have opted for a certain stature—the presidential stage, with its flags and salutes, almost leads you by the hand to stature. But he hasn’t.

His supporters, especially Republican candidates, would love it if he’d put his arguments in the foreground, not his drama and weirdness. It is remarkable that he hasn’t cared about them enough to do this, to give them that kind of cover. He’s lucky the mainstream media hate him so much, and in showing that hatred stiffen his supporters’ loyalty.

What did the Kavanaugh controversy tell us about our historical moment? It underscored what we already know, that America is politically and culturally divided and that activists and the two parties don’t just disagree with but dislike and distrust each other. We know also the Supreme Court has come to be seen not only as a constitutional (and inevitably political) body but as a cultural body. It follows cultural currents, moods, assumptions. It has frequently brushed past the concept of democratic modesty to make decisions that would most peacefully be left to the people, at the ballot box, after national debate. So citizens will experience the court as having great power over their lives, and nominations to the court will inevitably draw passion. And this was a fifth conservative seat on a nine-person court.

Sen. Susan Collins

But the Kavanaugh hearings had some new elements. There were no boundaries on inquiry, no bowing to the idea of a private self. Accusations were made about the wording of captions under yearbook photos. The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones—none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

Two Republican senators this week wrote to me with a sound of mourning. One found it “amazing” and “terrifying” that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.” The other cited “a truly disturbing result: One of the great political parties abandoning the Constitutionally-based traditions of due process and presumption of innocence.”

At the very least, Senate Democrats overplayed their hand.

My bias in cases of sexual abuse and assault, and it is a bias, is in favor of the woman. I give her words greater weight because I have not in my personal experience seen women lie about such allegations, and I know the reasons they have, in the past, kept silent. If you know your biases and are serious, you will try to be fair—not to overcorrect but to maintain standards. On Sept. 16, the day the charges made by Christine Blasey Ford appeared in the Washington Post, I was certain that more witnesses and information would come forward. We would see where justice lay. The great virtue of the #MeToo movement is that the whole phenomenon was broken open by numbers and patterns—numbers of victims, patterns of behavior, and the deep reporting that uncovered both. In this case great reporters tried to nail down Ms. Ford’s story. But they did not succeed. The New Yorker story that followed was dramatic but unpersuasive, a hand grenade whose pin could not be pulled. The final allegation, about rape-train parties and spiked punch, was not in the least credible.

It was Ms. Ford’s story that was compelling, but in need of support or corroboration. It did not come.

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon.

Ms. Collins noted that she had voted in favor of justices nominated by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She considers qualifications, not party. She reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s 12-year judicial record, including more than 300 opinions, speeches and law-review articles; she met with Judge Kavanaugh for more than two hours, and spoke with him again for an hour by phone with more questions.

She judged him centrist in his views and well within the mainstream of judicial thought. He believes, he told her, the idea of precedent is not only a practice or tradition but a tenet rooted in the Constitution.

As to Ms. Ford’s charges, since the confirmation process is not a trial, the rules are more elastic. “But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.”

“We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the gang-rape charge an “outlandish allegation” with no credible evidence.

At this point it was understood the Democrats had gone too far.

It is believable, said Ms. Collins, that Ms. Ford is a survivor of sexual assault and that the trauma “has upended her life.” But the four witnesses she named could not corroborate her account. None had any recollection of the party; her lifelong friend said under penalty of felony that she neither remembers such an event nor even knows Brett Kavanaugh.

Ms. Collins said she has been “alarmed and disturbed” by those who suggest that unless Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was rejected, the Senate would somehow be condoning sexual assault: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The atmosphere surrounding the nomination has been “politically charged” and reached “fever pitch” even before the Ford and other charges. It has been challenging to separate fact from fiction. But a decision must be made. Judge Kavanaugh’s record has been called one of “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father.” Her hope is he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

And so, she said, she would vote to confirm.

It was a master class in what a friend called “old-style thoroughness combined with a feeling for justice.”

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Democratic leaders should stand up to the screamers. They haven’t, because they’re afraid of them. But things like this spread and deepen.

Stand up to your base. It’s leading you nowhere good. And you know it.

I have been thinking about trust. All the polls show and have for some time what you already know: America’s trust in its leaders and institutions has been falling for four decades. Trust in the federal government has never been lower. In 1958 Pew Research found 73% trusted the government to do what is right “always” or “most of the time.” That sounds healthy. As of 2017 that number was 18%. That’s not.

Other institutions have suffered, too—the church, the press, the professions. That’s disturbing because those institutions often bolster our national life in highly personal ways. When government or law turns bad, they provide a place, a platform from which to stand, to make a case, to correct.

A problem that has so many parts and so much history—from Vietnam to Twitter bots—will not easily be solved. But there are things we can do individually to help America be more at peace with itself.

First, realize this isn’t merely a problem but a crisis. When you say you believe in and trust democratic institutions, you are saying you believe in and trust democracy itself. When you don’t, you don’t. When a nation tells pollsters it’s unable to trust its constituent parts it’s telling pollsters it doesn’t trust itself.

It’s time to see our mighty institutions with their noble facades—the grand marble court houses, the soaring cathedral—for what they are: secretly frail and in constant need of saving.

When you’re young and starting out you imagine institutions are monoliths—big, impervious to your presence. Later, having spent time within, you know how human and flawed it all is, and how it’s saved each day by the wisdom and patience—the quiet heroism—of a few. Be one of the few.

If you’re young it would be good at this point to enter your profession with a premature sense of the frailty of everything.

Six years ago I was invited to speak to a small West Point class. Polls had come out showing that the U.S. military still retained the trust of the people, and this was much on my mind. I wondered if the cadets knew how much was riding on them.

I told them the institution they’re about to enter was among the last standing, and one of their great jobs will be to keep it trustworthy.

Naturally maintaining their institution’s moral stature was not the main focus of their minds. So I told them a story of a great army of the West, admired by all, that did something wrong, and then a series of things, and by the end, when it came out, as such things do, it broke that army’s reputation in a way from which it never quite recovered. I was speaking of France and the Dreyfus affair. They had not heard of it.

There should be a course in it.

I urged them to conduct themselves so that such a thing could never happen in the U.S. Army. I don’t think I left them rushing to download Émile Zola on their iPads. I do think they were hearing for the first time how much America depends on them not only for military expertise but to keep up the national morale.

In many ways we’re too national in our thinking. Don’t always be thinking up there. Be thinking here, where life takes place. In building trust think close to home. If your teenager judges an institution called Business in America by the billionaire hedge funder spouting inane thoughts on cable TV with a look on his face that says “See how original I am!” then capitalism is doomed. You can’t make your teenager admire slippery, rapacious tech gods in Silicon Valley. But if your children understand business in America as modeled by you—as honorable men and women engaged in an honorable pursuit—then they will have respect for the institution of business. If for no other reason be honest in your dealings, be compassionate, and provide excellence.

Realize there’s a difference between skepticism and cynicism, that one is constructive and the other childish.

Skepticism involves an intellectual exercise: You look at the grand surface knowing it may not reflect the inner reality. It implies action: If it doesn’t, try to make it better. Cynicism is a dodge: Everything’s crud, you’d be a fool to try and make it better, it’s all irredeemable and unchangeable.

Be skeptical of our institutions, not cynical toward them.

For those who operate on any level of our public life, hear this: Some of our problems can be resolved or made less dramatic and assaultive by an old-fashioned concept that used to exist in American public life. It is called tact. We are in an epidemic of tactlessness, which is an absence of respect for the other side, for whoever is on that side. It is an utter lack of generosity and sensitivity.

“Bake my cake” is, among other things, a stunning example of lack of tact. You’re supposed to win graciously, not rub the loser’s face in it.

If you are, say, in the U.S. Congress, where both parties failed for a quarter-century to regulate our borders effectively, and those forced to live with the results of that derogation rise up and demand action, the correct response is not to imply they are nativist racist bigots.

You listen to people, you don’t label them insultingly.

A tactful response? “We take your point—we haven’t succeeded and we’ll try to get it right. In the meantime, since we’re all imperfect human beings, please don’t let your anger turn into something small, biased and narrow. While you investigate your heart, we will get to work.”

You lose nothing when you hear and respect criticism. You gain trust.

Finally, we ask so much of government, which is not, we know, the most competent of institutions. When we ask too much and multiply its tasks, it’s likely to fail, and when it does we become angry—and trust goes down again.

Our founders were skeptical of concentrated power. The power of government, arrayed against the individual, could crush him. They devised checks, balances, enumerated rights. Those who believe in their wisdom should speak of it more persuasively.

To this day many Republicans speak of what they call “limited government.” This is an unfortunate and unpersuasive phrase. Usage changes. To most people “limited” means insufficient, not up to the task. “He had the heart of a quarterback but was limited by his small stature.” Americans know they have limited government. They’ve been to the DMV. What they’d like is a government that acknowledges its limits and understands itself as one of many players in the democratic drama—not the central player but a present and competent one. A realistic government, a humble government, at the very least a more collegial one.

President Trump cannot help. Increasing public trust is not his declared mission, and what it would take is not in his toolbox. He tends in his statements to undermine trust: His own government is embarked on a deep-state witch-hunt conspiracy, his agencies are incompetent, the press is fake-news liars.

On Memorial Day we think of those who served. Here let’s look at an old story about a military man’s affections. It’s the story of Lo Armistead and Win Hancock—close friends, career officers who’d served side by side in the U.S. Army. Then history took one of its turns and they wound up on opposite sides at Gettysburg, where one was killed by the other’s troops. It is one of the most moving tales of the Civil War, and is warmly told in Michael Shaara’s classic novel, “The Killer Angels.”

It’s a good story to have in our minds as coming years unfold.

In June 1863, 155 years ago, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s 70,000-man Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac River and invaded the North.

Brig. Gen. Lewis “Lo” Armistead, 46, was with him. Lo was an abbreviation of his nickname, Lothario, wryly bestowed because that’s what he wasn’t. He was quiet, considered shy, twice widowed, and from a family of fighters. Armisteads had served in all of America’s wars. Now and then something broke through his composure: Everyone in the Army knew he’d left West Point after breaking a plate over fellow cadet Jubal Early’s head. Shaara: “He was an honest man, open as the sunrise.” And he was brave.

He was eventually based in Southern California, where his quartermaster, Winfield Scott Hancock, became his close friend.

Armistead was seven years older and from Virginia, while Hancock was from Pennsylvania, but they had much in common. Hancock had also attended West Point, though he graduated. Both had served in the Mexican War, both been lauded for gallantry and promoted to higher rank. Hancock was humorous and liked to paint. Years later, in his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant would remember Hancock as “a man of very conspicuous personal appearance. . . . His genial disposition made him friends, and his personal courage and his presence with his command in the thickest of the fight won him the confidence of troops serving under him.”

By the end of the Civil War he too had a nickname: “Hancock the Superb.”

When the war came the officers of the U.S. Army had to decide where they stood. Hancock stood firm with the Union; Armistead went with the Confederacy. We don’t know all Armistead’s thinking but Shaara suggests some of it in his portrayal of the thoughts of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, also Armistead’s friend and under whom he served. Longstreet did not think much of “the Cause.” To Longstreet, “the war had come as a nightmare in which you chose your nightmare side.”

Shaara suggests Armistead saw it pretty much the same. But unlike many on his side, Longstreet wasn’t in denial as to the war’s cause. “The war was about slavery, all right,” he said, in Shaara’s telling. That wasn’t why he fought, “but that was what the war was about.”

When the war came, Armistead, Hancock and others had a gathering to say goodbye. Shaara imagines a soldier’s farewell: “Goodbye, good luck, and see you in Hell.” But to Armistead it was more than that: “They had been closer than brothers.” Tears were shed. In Shaara’s story, Armistead tells Hancock: “Win, so help me, if I ever lift a hand against you may God strike me dead.” In other sources, Armistead says: “Goodbye. You can never know what this has cost me.”

It was the last time they would see each other.

Some time afterward Armistead sent Almira, Hancock’s wife, a package to be opened on the event of his death.

Two years into the war, Gettysburg. Armistead heard Hancock was there and asked Longstreet if he might see him. Sure, said Longstreet, if you can find his position, get a flag of truce and go on over. (This was not completely unheard of in that war: Opposing officers would find each other in field glasses and wave hello or tip their hats.)

But everything was too chaotic, nobody knew where they were, and it didn’t happen.

July 3 was Pickett’s Charge. Armistead was one of Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s brigade commanders.

Lee judged the Union army to be reinforced on the wings but soft in the center. That center was a long sloping field leading to a clump of trees at a ridge. He would send in 15,000 men and split the Union lines. It would be hard—a mile uphill, over open ground, with Union artillery trained on them behind a low stone wall. But the Confederate artillery would smash the Union artillery before the charge commenced. And then they’d break the Union line, and the Union.

It was of course one of the epic miscalculations in modern military history.

At some point Armistead heard who was up there waiting at the stone wall. It was the Second Corps. It was led by Win Hancock. Armistead knew: He wouldn’t break.

The charge began, Armistead led his brigade out of the woods and onto the field. Quickly the Union artillery opened up. Shells came raining down; canisters of metal balls whirled through the air. Explosions, musketry. Union men were out in the open, kneeling and firing. Men fell all around. The smoke thickened and the troops could barely see, so Armistead put his black felt hat on the tip of his sword, held it up and called, “Follow me.”

Troops fell, gaps closed. About 30 yards from the wall, “unable to advance, unwilling to run,” the charge stalled and stopped. Armistead knew it was over. He was hit in the leg but kept going. He reached the wall and made it to the other side. He was hit again and doubled over, then hit yet again. He sat down.

A Union officer came over. Armistead asked for Gen. Hancock. The officer apologized: Hancock had been hit.

Armistead asked the officer to give him a message: “Tell General Hancock that General Armistead sends his regrets.”

Armistead died in a Union hospital tent.

Pickett, amazingly, survived, but was bitter about Lee to the end. His division sustained 60% casualties. Of 13 colonels, seven died and six were wounded. The Confederate army would never recover.

Longstreet was with Lee at Appomattox. Soon after the war he became a Republican—and supported his friend Grant in his efforts to rebuild the South. Naturally they never forgave him.

Hancock survived his wounds and the war. In 1880 he ran for president as a Democrat. He lost to Republican James A. Garfield of Ohio, who’d fought at Shiloh. It was close—he lost the popular vote by only 9,000. But Hancock the Superb, hero of the Union Army, swept the South.

In time it became known what was in the package Lo Armistead sent Almira Hancock. It was his personal Bible.

All these stories are part of our history and should never be lost. If we lose them we lose ourselves, and we lose, too, part of the gift we give our immigrants, which is stories that explain the thing they have joined.

The stories should be told plain but with heart, too.

We’ve overcome a great deal. We see this best when we don’t deny our history but tell the whole messy, complicated, embarrassing, ennobling tale.

Happy Memorial Day. Show generosity to a foe this weekend. Or better, be brave and show love.

‘You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better.” That was Stephen Vincent Benet in 1941, in the Saturday Review of Literature, on the work of Scott Fitzgerald, who had recently died.

I thought of it on the death of Tom Wolfe. Not that he was ignored or forgotten, but we are coming to terms with his greatness in a purer, less guarded way than in the past.

He picked up American journalism and shook it hard, then he picked up the novel and shook that too. He saw what was happening all around us, and he said that’s not “what’s happening,” that’s history—the social and cultural story of the great Hog-stomping Baroque America of the second half of the 20th century, which was begging to be captured and finally was, by him, in a way no one else would or could.

Tom Wolfe

He invented characters that presented us to ourselves. He had two masterpieces, “The Right Stuff” in nonfiction and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” in fiction. He issued one of the great literary manifestos: Stop your navel gazing, get out your notebook, there’s a world exploding out there.

His words entered the language. He fearlessly, brazenly faced up to America’s blood wars, its ethnic and racial rivalries, its merry bitterness. “Yo, Gober!” “He’s another Donkey, same as me.”

On top of that he strutted through the world like some crazed, antique peacock—the faded vanilla suits, the high-collar shirts, polka-dot ties, the socks and handkerchief, the spats.

What a figure! When I heard the news I thought of last November, at the New York Public Library’s annual gala. When I walked in he and Sheila, his warm, elegant wife, were seated alone as the party raged around them. I kissed them hello, they asked me to sit, and 20 minutes later, after talk of Donald Trump, toward whom he was equal parts fair-minded, amused and amazed, I left to join friends. Halfway through the room I turned back. Tom was gazing, bemused, at the crowd. “That’s Dickens,” I said to a friend. “That’s Zola.” There should have been a line waiting to meet him, to say, “I shook Tom Wolfe’s hand.”

I saw him over many years and thought of him as Paul McHugh, a professor and psychiatrist who was his close friend, did. “He was warmhearted,” he said. Tom Wolfe had killer eyes but was not cold. There was sweetness there, and sympathy. He wrote of social status, and as Dr. McHugh said, “he was especially great at deflating those whose position led them to the bullying of others.”

He worked himself hard. Dr. McHugh would call him and say, “I know I’m interrupting you.” Tom would reply, “Thank God!”

He suffered and was gallant. He’d had scoliosis when young, and an injury the past decade had left him with a spinal misalignment. He was bent sharply at the waist; his trunk tilted right. He was often in pain. His famous walking stick with the wolf’s head wasn’t only for fun and show, he needed it to walk.

Imagine caring so much about how you presented yourself to the world and facing that challenge. Imagine doing it anyway, in part because it gives the world delight.

We met more than 20 years ago when we were thrown together as seatmates at a Manhattan think-tank dinner. The auspices were not good. I’d recently tangled with a close friend of his, and to make it worse I’d been in the wrong and knew it. Beyond that I was awed. I never told him, but my first book was half an homage to him: “Bonfire” and his manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” filled my soul. His prose had an anarchic, liberating impact. In one chapter I realized my puny self was in the thick of history. I set myself to describing the audio experience of Air Force Two, its curious, soft pulsating sound. GARRRUUUMMMM. “The engines weaving in and out; the air conditioned hum; the soft murmurings of power: I’m flying.” My editor was alarmed. Cut that: “People will think you’re imitating Tom Wolfe!” “I am imitating Tom Wolfe! It’s my tribute!” He laughed. We kept it.

At the dinner, uncomfortable and awed, I turned earnest. Nothing’s more boring than that! Still, we were together, and did our best. At one point he started talking about what was happening in neuroscience. He was amused by the new pill that affects sexual mood—I think he said sexual readiness—it’s flying off the shelves! I said yes, but the pill that will be more popular, and which they’ll eventually make, will be the one that makes you fall back in love, because that will solve everyone’s problems. “He’s responsible and sweet but it’s just not enough!” “I don’t love my wife anymore!” That’s the pill that will really sell!

We giggled. He gave me a scrutinizing look and said: “You’re quite a woman.” I answered solemnly, as if considering the proposition obvious and the burden heavy: “Yes, I am.” He threw back his head, and we were off to the races.

The last time I saw him was almost three months ago, at the wedding of a brilliant young woman and a handsome man. The wedding party was in a fashionable restaurant in downtown New York. We were seated at a red leather banquette, where we had a Writer Moment. I looked out at the boisterous crowd—laughing, gesturing, talking over the din, big decibels. I said, “Tom, this sound of the voices hitting the ceiling, the laughter—this reminds me of the description in ‘Bonfire’ of a grand Park Avenue party or reception: ‘Their swimming teeth.’”

Tom got a look of immediate interest, a flush of approval. “Did I say that?”

“You did.”

He laughed like Oh, that was good.

I said I remember reading it and thinking “Oh, I am in a presence.” He pressed my hand and held it for a moment.

Once the aged Tolstoy was in his sitting room, a fire in the fireplace. His daughter came in and said “Papa, listen.” She read a page of a description of a great battle. He listened and said, “Oh, that’s good. Who is that?” She said, “Papa, it’s you. ‘War and Peace.’ ”

All writers forget. And the greatest and most prolific forget most.

This was a great man. And I see him now as I did a dozen years ago, again at a New York Public Library dinner. We met as we were leaving, walked through the lobby, parted at the door.

It was something to see that man going down the broad imposing steps, tricked out in the white suit, a flowing black cape, a big, broad brimmed black hat worn at a tilt, the stick, walking carefully but with a certain flair, a certain élan, because he knew he was being watched because he was, let’s face it, Tom Wolfe. And I was watching, as he disappeared into the night, into the teeming city, going northward toward home.

Goodbye Tom Wolfe. May you be awed, thrilled and over the moon this day by what you find now, a new and unreported world. “Flights of angels—”

An occasional preoccupation in this space is that young people have no particular loyalty to or affection for free-market capitalism, the economic system that made America a great thing in history and a magnet for the world. There are two reasons. One is that in their short lives they’ve witnessed and experienced only capitalism’s scandals—the 2008 crash, inequality. The other is that they’ve never heard capitalism defended—not in K through college, not in our entertainment culture. When you don’t especially admire something you feel no inclination to protect it, which will have serious political implications down the road.

We should all make the case for capitalism, especially our idiot billionaires and especially those in Silicon Valley. Some, by which I mean Mark Zuckerberg in particular, act as if America is special mostly because it provided a stage for their fabulousness, otherwise not much. During a hearing last month Sen. Dan Sullivan referred to Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm-room invention and said: “Only in America, would you agree with that?” Mr. Zuckerberg seemed taken aback and mumbled around. “You’re supposed to answer ‘yes’ to this question,” Mr. Sullivan explained.

Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot

But let’s get to a non-idiot billionaire. Ken Langone, 82, investor, philanthropist and founder of Home Depot, has written an autobiography that actually conveys the excitement of business—of starting an enterprise that creates a job that creates a family, of the joy of the deal and the place of imagination in the making of a career. Its hokey and ebullient name is “I Love Capitalism” which I think makes his stand clear.

Why did he write it? I asked him by phone. He wanted to show gratitude, to inspire the young—“If I can make it, everyone can!”—and he wanted young voters to understand socialism is not the way. “In 2016 I saw Bernie Sanders and the kids around him. I thought: This is the antichrist! We have the greatest engine in the world.” The wealthy have an absolute obligation to help others: “Where would we be if people didn’t share their wealth? I got 38 kids on Bucknell scholarships. They’re all colors of the rainbow; some are poor kids, rough around the edges. It’s capitalism!” He famously funds NYU/Langone Medical Center.

He worries about the future of economic freedom and sees the selfishness of some of the successful as an impediment. “Are there people who are greedy, who do nothing for anyone? Yes.” They should feel shame. If the system goes down they’ll be part of the reason. “But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!”

Can capitalism win the future? “Yes, but we have to be more emphatic and forthright about what it is and its benefits. A rising tide does lift boats.”

Home Depot has changed lives. “We have 400,000 people who work there, and we’ve never once paid anybody minimum wage.” Three thousand employees “came to work for us fresh out of high school, didn’t go to college, pushing carts in the parking lot. All 3,000 are multimillionaires. Salary, stock, a stock savings plan.”

Mr. Langone came up in the middle of the 20th century—the golden age of American capitalism. Does his example still pertain to the 21st? Yes, he says emphatically: “The future is rich in opportunity.” To see it, look for it. For instance: “Look, people are living longer. They’re living more vibrant lives, more productive. This is an opportunity to accommodate the needs of older people. Better products, cheaper prices—help them get what they need!”

Mr. Langone grew up in blue-collar Long Island, N.Y. Neither parent finished high school. His father was a plumber who was poor at business; his mother worked in the school cafeteria. They lived paycheck to paycheck. He was a lousy student but he had one big thing going for him: “I loved making money.” He got his first job at 11 and often worked two at a time—paperboy, butcher-shop boy, caddie, lawn work, Bohack grocery clerk. He didn’t mind: “I wanted to be rich.”

He got into Bucknell University when the registrar saw something in him despite his grades. He scraped through, enjoyed economics class. His mother prayed every day to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, that he’d find good sense and self-discipline. He met a beautiful Long Island girl named Elaine, they married; he looked for work on Wall Street, found some after struggling, and went to New York University at night for a business degree from what’s now called the Langone Program.

By the spring of 1965 he was not yet 30 and earning $100,000 a year in commissions alone. He loved mergers and acquisitions. For his first initial public offering, he nailed down Ross Perot and EDS. By his mid-30s he was Mr. Perot’s banker and quite full of himself. Naturally his business soon wobbled, almost cratered, and righting the ship took years.

Then came Home Depot. You’ll have to read the book to hear the story. Ross Perot decided not to invest.

Mr. Langone’s book is not only helpful, it’s fun. He doesn’t offer rules for living but you can discern some between the lines.

1. Take your religious faith seriously. His Catholicism gave him safe harbor in storms and left him “sensitive to the plight and needs of others.”

2. Marry for the long run. He and Elaine have been wed 63 years. When things were good she cheered him on; when they weren’t she let him know “she would always be there for me—win, lose or draw.”

3. You teach values by living them. Don’t say—do. People absorb eloquent action.

4. “Pray at the feet of hard work.” Be ravenous in reading about your field, whichever you wind up in and for however long.

5. Money solves the problems money can solve. Don’t ask more of it, and don’t be ashamed of wanting it. “A kid once said to me, ‘Money doesn’t buy everything.’ I said, ‘Well, kid, I was poor, and I can tell you right now poverty doesn’t do a very good job either.’ ”

6. Stay excited. Don’t be sated.

7. Admit the reality around you, then change it. When Mr. Langone couldn’t get an entry level job at Goldman Sachs, Kidder Peabody or White Weld, an executive took him aside: “Let me tell you the lay of the land. We have Jewish firms for Jewish kids and we have WASP firms for WASP kids. The Irish we make clerks, and put them on the floor of the stock exchange, and Italian kids like you we put in the back office.” When Mr. Langone began to succeed, he started to hire—and brought in the sons of cops who went to St. John’s. This contributed to “the democratization of Wall Street.”

8. When you’re successful you’ll put noses out of joint, even among colleagues who benefit from your work. Be careful about jealousy but in the end roll with it, it’s human nature. When you “piss off the old guard,” become the old guard—and help the clever rise.

It’s over, the conversation has turned and won’t bubble up again till early next year but a final thing should be said about the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It’s been persuasively argued that the dinner hurt journalism (true) and politics in general (yes). But I think it hurt America.

Here, with apologies but to make a point (the TV clips don’t capture it) is a sample of the comic stylings of Michelle Wolf, in the centerpiece speech of the evening. To put things in historical context, the tampon joke is very much like what Walter Lippmann said of Mamie Eisenhower. Oh wait, that’s wrong. But the banging bimbos reference is reminiscent of what Bobby Kennedy said about Scotty Reston. Oh dear, that’s wrong too. Anyway here’s what Michelle Wolf said.

Broadcast of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

On Mike Pence : “He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it—you know, you’ve got to get that baby out of there.” Paul Ryan has been circumcised. “Unfortunately, while they were down there they also took his balls.” Ivanka Trump is “about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons.” “She’s the Diaper Genie of the administration: on the outside, she looks sleek, but the inside, it’s full of sh—.” “Like a porn star when she’s about to have sex with Donald Trump, ‘Let’s get this over with.’ ” “Oh, you don’t think he’s good in bed.” Of Sarah Sanders: “Like, what’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh I know, Aunt Coulter. ” Also, she’d like to make fun of Democrats but they’re “harder to make fun of because you guys don’t do anything.” Lucky them.

The above is an abridged version of Ms. Wolf’s quotes, because most of them didn’t make it past my editors. These are the tamer ones.

What’s wrong with those remarks? You’re thinking of words like vulgar, grubby and immature, and you’re right, and you’re detecting an embarrassing fixation on sexual organs and bodily functions, and you’re right there too.

But you also think—you want to think: This is below us. It used to be. Can’t it be below us again?

The dinner is decadent. It is the Capitol elite in “The Hunger Games.” It takes place in the great political capital of the world, with its most powerful figures in journalism and politics, and they giggle at dirty jokes.

It is weird. They are, almost all of them, better than that. But they invited the comedian and acted out mirth. Everyone who laughed was lowered.

Each year the WHCA dinner gets grubbier and more partisan. Each year there is a heavier insistence on hitting the audience’s sweet spot, center-left sanctimony. Instead of admitting and correcting all this, participants take refuge in their own form of disapproval porn: You raise one eyebrow, briefly give one shake of the head, stare at the cutlery and then, when you think the camera is off you in the reaction shot, deftly lean in and say something encouraging to the victim of a joke. In this way you think you’re preserving your dignity. You are not.

Comedians have defended the routine: “Michelle Wolf killed.” Fine, it’s their job to hate censorship and burst boundaries. They feel tribal loyalty. It’s not their job to have good judgment and uphold what remains of public dignity. It’s not their job not to embarrass the nation. That’s more the responsibility of the journalists and politicians, who failed.

The dinner hurts America in two ways. The first and more obvious is that it is, functionally, elite journalists telling half of America: We hate you. It’s as if they break out of their “This just in” face and say, “You know how you think we don’t share your values and respect your views? You know how you think we’re biased, self-infatuated twerps who think we’re better than you? It’s true! We do! Ha ha!” Mainstream media’s disdain for half the country is not news to them—they know exactly what their betters think. But how does it make our country better to grind your heel into the wound? How does that enhance the position of the press?

Second, the world is watching. It is odd journalists forget this, but they do. Every foreign capital gets the full, instantaneous report; every ambassador shares his observations in his lame weekly letter home. This week they reported on the American leadership class—its great journalists and CEOs and politicians—chortling over jokes that were primitive, squalid and deeply stupid. This just might lead the absorbers of this information to conclude the American leadership class itself is those things.

“It is,” you say.

But America in its ego often puts itself forward as a moral exemplar, the greatest nation. Maybe our friends in foreign capitals look and think, again: “They’re not just slobs, they’re liars. They’re hollow.”

When you see a hollow tree you just want to push it over.

People attend the dinner for the reasons of vanity we all share—wanting to be on the inside, wanting a public affirmation of your importance. For Republicans and conservatives there’s an additional reason: to show what good sports they are. But they should never go again. There is no need for them to cooperate in their humiliation, and no gain in it. The people back home are not impressed. The people in the room are not touched. You look like a fool.

No great newspaper, no serious organ of journalism, should ever attend again. Why hurt your profession by showing so much of your ugly side?

The dinner is an anachronism representing a world of Washington journalism that began disappearing, culturally and technologically, two generations ago. Times pass, things change. What was once an event of stature—a sign to journalists that they’d arrived or were arriving, a way for money men to get a personal bounce out of ad money spent, a way to make a good impression on a potential source, and for everyone to feel part of something meaningful and important, American journalism—is over.

It is a lost world. When you’ve got a lost world start a new one. Make it better.

The dinner’s organizers can’t reform themselves. If they could they’d already have done it. No one wants to be the censor, no one wants to be the joke Nazi, no one wants their first dinner to be called staid.

Scrap it and start again. The reason for the dinner is to give scholarships and recognition to aspiring journalists, and reward some current ones. So throw a banquet to honor the winners. The scholarship winners will be delighted to meet those they think real stars—reporters, anchors, editors. Offer witty, heartening, inspiring speeches. Impart a sense of how to be in the world, how to act, which doesn’t involve roaring over tampon jokes and the inherent comedy of abortion.

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is a blind, sick, stumbling horse desperate to be put down. Put it out of its misery.